I am my blog's and my blog is mine
It’s Elul — a time to reflect on the past and prepare for the future, a time to concentrate (even more than usual) on turning away from sin, a time to renew and rebuild those things that have been neglected.
Such as, say, posting to a blog that’s been on a long hiatus.
So I hear we have a Presidential election coming up in a few months….
Moving, moving, moving
If you see this posting, it’s a sign that I have sucessfully migrated this blog from my old Fedora 4 virtual server at OpenHosting to my new Debian Etch virtual server at Linode. (The OpenHosting guys have given me great service, but I’m tired of learning how many Linux software packages that I need are unavailable as RPMs.)
As far as I can tell, the only glitch in the migration process was that a whole bunch of ” and ם characters were somehow corrupted. (Hell, to paraphrase Sartre, is other character sets.) But I think that’s fixed now.
0.2 score years ago...
Hey, look, it’s my fourth blogiversary!
According to my clever parsing of my HTTP logs, roughly 200 people (well, roughly 200 distinct IP addresses that are unlikely to belong to bots) read this blog directly over the Web; LiveJournal reports that 40 users are subscribed to its syndication feed over there; a smattering of other people might be reading this through other syndication services.
So who are y’all? Pull up some virtual chairs, introduce yourselves, advertise your own blogs. See, I even made the comment box bigger, so you can get comfortable.
Selling little plastic shovels to the Gold Rush prospectors
I have to admire the chutzpah of whoever conceived of this publication.
Greetings from Virginia
If you can see this (and the domain name in your browser doesn’t begin with “groundcherry”), then your DNS client can see ropine.com at its new IP address, which points to a virtual server run by the nice folks at OpenHosting.
There is a certain cachet to being able to tell people “go to this URL and you will see a Web page served from a computer that is in my basement”, but it’s not worth the tzuris of losing a long weekend’s worth of hits, or more, when the server flakes out and I can’t go down to that basement and fix it right away.
Also, it turns out that it will cost less for me to get a virtual server at OpenHosting (where I am still root within my sandbox) plus a standard DSL service for home (the kind that doesn’t let me run a server), than it’s costing me now to have a static IP address (the kind that does let me run a server in my basement) through Speakeasy.
(If you do want to host a Web server in your basement, or have some other reason to want a geek-friendly ISP, we heartily recommend Speakeasy. We have no complaints about the service they’ve given us; it’s just that we’re moving on to a different kind of service.)
P.S.: Sorry for the hiatus; between Pesach, a string of illnesses in the nuclear family, and a string of visits to and from the extended family, blogging time has been, shall we say, constrained.
P.P.S.: Happy third blogiversary to me!
Welcome to the machine
If you can read this, your browser or feed aggregator was successfully redirected to the TextPattern-based version of this blog. Permalinks to the old blog will continue to work until I either set up a massive number of redirects or screw up my Apache configuration again.
All the old entries should have been imported, although there are some formatting glitches, especially in the entries with source code. All the non-spammy comments should also be here.
I have resisted the urge to spend six months tweaking the design before going live, but I will just point out that in this new layout, if you’re using a text-based browser, the content conveniently precedes the stuff in the sidebars; and if you’re not, the colored background of each entry has four rounded corners. Ph33r my 31337 CSS $kill$.
We value your opinions…
...but comments have been temporarily disabled.
After a new reader noticed some particularly amusing comment spam, I searched some more through my archives, and installed a plugin to email me every time a new comment was posted, and…wow.
Unfortunately, blosxom (or, more precisely, blosxom’s standard “writeback” plugin) stores all the comments for one post in a single flat file, and has neither a spam-filter plugin nor a Web-based administrative interface. Therefore, managing comment spam—an essential part of managing any blog that’s open to comments and is indexed by Google—is a major pain. In the long run (hopefully within a week or so), I’m going to migrate this blog to a different platform. In the short run, I’ve turned off the writeback plugin.
You can still comment on recent postings in yesh omrim’s LiveJournal feed (if, that is, you have been assimilated into the Collectivehave an LJ account). Or you can send me email. And you should. Because we care.
Teshuvah
If you’ve been wondering where this blog has been for the past two months, the answer is simple: I spent Elul and Tishrei atoning for the sin of not backing up my server. Fortunately, I still had files on the machine that had been hosting this blog up until September 2004, and a large number of the blog postings from the following year could be reconstructed from Bloglines and from search-engine caches.
A friend of mine has introduced me to Unison, and my new server, God willing, is backed up daily and the backups are copied to an undisclosed location. There are some mistakes I really don’t want to make twice.
Email to ropine.com is now even less reliable than usual
I am changing mail servers; the domain name will stay the same, but the physical machine and the IP address will be new. If you sent me email since yesterday afternoon and it seems to have vanished into the ether, it’s probably just sitting at your ISP’s server waiting for DNS to get its act together. If you’ve sent me email since this morning and it’s bounced with a strange error message, it’s probably because I hadn’t quite figured out how to get Postfix, DSPAM, and maildrop to talk nicely to one another.
To serve you better….
I’ve finally figured out how to make HTML::Parser do the right thing, so now, if you type comments into the box at the bottom of an individual blog entry, you can use some HTML, but “ugly” and “unsafe” tags and attributes will be stripped out. By “ugly”, I mean anything that might screw up the page layout, such as the <h1> tag. By “unsafe”, I mean anything that might be used as a carrier for a cross-site scripting attack, like the “onLoad” attribute.
Coming soon: the RSS template will change so that the permalink will point to the individual blog-entry page (http://dynamic.ropine.com/yo/meta/comments-v2.html) instead of the page with all the entries of that day (http://dynamic.ropine.com/2004/07/05#comments-v2). This might make LiveJournal and other syndication services think I’ve just posted a half-dozen completely new entries, so I thought I’d warn y’all before I did it.
